ABSTRACT
One of the reasons given to justify obedience to international policies refers to those rights and rules established by a regime polity which govern participation by nonstate actors. How did these rules historically emerge in international institutions? In what way have the political activities of non-state actors caused the creation of such procedures? How far do decision-making procedures of international regimes consider the participatory claims of an emerging global civil society? Do these procedures reflect the normative requirements of equality and reciprocity, openness, or discursiveness? Before we can deal with these questions, it should be noted that a great portion of the empirical data which have been collected for answering these questions are not included in the IRD. The design of the IRD was initially driven by the intention to explore whether a number of explanations for the formation or effectiveness of environmental regimes can be maintained, will be disproved, or must be changed when confronted with empirical findings that are based on a set of cases exceeding the small number of case studies normally used for the development or testing of theoretical approaches. The developers of this database are aware of the fact that many questions that will be researched in connection with this database can sufficiently be answered only by using additional information that is not included in the database itself.
